Wild Chamomile

College Roommates

Brooke and I (and probably Tamara taking the photo) hanging out on the stairs down to the basement apartment.

Below is a work-in-progress about roommates.

I knelt over the twelve-inch square of watercolor paper in the living room — which was actually my bedroom — on the hard gray carpet. I was working on an assignment for my watercolor painting class where we had to use fifteen different mediums —including watercolor — in one painting. I lit a cigarette, took a drag, and used the lighter to scorch the watercolor paper in front of me on the floor. I surveyed the painting, which already included paint, ink, pencil and charcoal, and now I was improvising.

I ashed my cigarette onto the gray carpet, where it blended right in. This potentially disgusting habit didn’t bother me or Tamara in the least, since the small one-bedroom apartment that Tamara found for us near the school was already verging on disgusting, but was only $75 a month each.

I saw feet out the window coming downstairs. One of our windows looked out onto the stairway down to our place, and the other looked into the gutter. Sometimes people threw their trash into the gutter and it went past the window. When they did, one or both of us flew up the basement stairs to announce, “Hey! We live down here, don’t throw your trash past our window!” and laughed at the strangers’ gaping faces as they tried to wrap their minds around the fact that these students had somehow managed to literally live in the gutter.

The feet going past the window today turned out to be Brian and Kevin who arrived in the doorway where Brian announced that Kevin needed a place to live.

“He can live in the kitchen,” I said, looking up from my work. I hadn’t run into him lately, and was happy to see him.

“Totally,” agreed Tamara, tilting her head and lighting her own cigarette, her dyed burgundy bangs falling in front of her face. And so Kevin went to get everything he had out of his car.

While he unpacked, I pried open one of our kitchen cupboards and found some sugar. While drinking last weekend, Tamara and I had painted the cupboards red with old house paint we found in a closet, so they were still shiny and tacky when I tried to open the doors.

Back on the carpet, I let an ash from my cigarette fall onto the paper, where it burned a tiny hole as it landed. Inspired, I poured the sugar onto the paper and burned that in with the lighter. Then I used some watercolor paint over all of it as Kevin brought his minimal amount of things to the corner in the kitchen. We had another mattress in there already, next to a low table which made up our really casual dining area, so he set that up as his bed.

After he finished unpacking, he clanked through the plastic jumble of tapes on the altar of candles, incense, and little bits of art that resided across from my mattress. Pushing his blonde shoulder-length hair behind his ears, he popped a Breeders tape into the tape player that had unwittingly become the centerpiece of the altar.

As the music wafted around the apartment, Brian opened some take-out from the Korean place upstairs, and cracked open a beer from the six pack he had just stashed in our fridge.

“Want a beer?” he asked from the open fridge door.

Yes,” Tamara and I answered simultaneously.

“Here,” he handed each of us a Pacifico and grabbed a can of 7-up for Kevin, who didn’t drink beer.

“Thanks for letting me crash here,” Kevin said, looking down, once we were all settled back in.

“Of course Kevin!” smiled Tamara and we toasted to our new roommate. I leaned in next to him on the mattress and he smiled, still looking down. We didn’t ask why he needed housing so suddenly, but we did have an inkling that his life at home was not great. And when I moved back to San Francisco at the end of the semester, he would already be here so wouldn’t have to find a new roommate.

I had class pretty soon so I eventually went back to the other room and worked on my painting, which had become more interesting with all the burnt sugar and scorch marks. Kevin came in and looked over at the art appreciatively then looked away really fast, smiling to himself. Tamara laughed and Brian rose to leave for class.

Kevin then went to the kitchen, rummaged through his things, came back and handed me a small glass bottle of dried flower blossoms he had brought with him, “for your art”, he said smiling, and looked down again.

“Thank you Kevin,” But I felt guilty taking the bottle since I didn’t think my work was art, just experiments with craft that didn’t say anything. But I opened the bottle anyway, the flowers were wild chamomile, which I remembered lining the driveway and the edges of the barns where I grew up. I sprinkled some flowers onto the paper, which were like fairy dust on a still life. There was something to it. And even though it didn’t feel like I had anything I was trying to express, I kept working, pulled on by those flowers.

Kevin went back into the kitchen and started cooking dinner for us.